And it was!" exclaimed O'Toole. "I was a young man, keen to get on in the business, working with great people, living in a part of the world that fascinated me, and forming an enduring friendship with Omar Sharif," who played Sherif Ali.

While making the film, O'Toole recalled, he and Sharif would "film nonstop for 10 days and then have three or four days off.

"We had the use of a private plane to fly to Beirut — this was in its better days — and misbehaved ourselves appallingly! Terribly! Omar loved gambling, too, so we'd lose all our money at the casino — we once did about nine months' wages in one night — and then get up to the usual things young men get up to."

"Lawrence!," O'Toole cried, tossing back a slug of Scotch during a 1963 interview in a Dublin hotel bar with writer Gay Talese for Esquire magazine. "I became obsessed by that man, and it was bad.

"A true artist should be able to jump into a bucket of [excrement] and come out smelling of violets, but I spent two years and three months making that picture, and it was two years, three months of thinking about nothing but Lawrence, and you were him, and that's how it was day after day, and it became bad for me personally, and it killed my acting later."

He was, he said, "emotionally bankrupt after that picture."

And seeing himself on screen in "Lawrence of Arabia" was not a pleasant experience.

"Oh, it's painful seeing it all there on the screen, solidified, embalmed," O'Toole told Talese. "Once a thing is solidified it stops being a living thing. That's why I love the theater. It's the Art of the Moment. I'm in love with ephemera and I hate permanence."

When he was cast in "Lawrence of Arabia," O'Toole already had earned a reputation as one of Britain's most acclaimed young stage actors.

He gained fame on the London stage in 1959 — and earned the London Critics Award for best actor of the year — playing the insubordinate Cockney private in Willis Hall's World War II-set anti-war play "The Long and the Short and the Tall."

In his review, theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote: "In the case of Mr. O'Toole, I sense a technical authority that may, given the discipline and purpose, presage greatness."